The Korea Herald

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Google engineer vows to improve search

By Kim Young-won

Published : Oct. 15, 2013 - 19:44

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Kim Young-jin, a senior software engineer for Google, speaks at Web portal Naver’s developers, conference in Seoul Tuesday. (Naver) Kim Young-jin, a senior software engineer for Google, speaks at Web portal Naver’s developers, conference in Seoul Tuesday. (Naver)
A senior Korean software developer working for Google pledged to help develop a search engine that provides better and accurate results.

“We’ll try to develop Google’s search system so that it can become a more advanced computing system to better meet the needs of the users,” said Kim Young-jin, a senior software engineer at the Internet giant, who participated in a developers conference held by Korean Web portal service provider Naver in Seoul on Tuesday.

In Korea, Naver is the dominant search engine, while Google is less used.

“The Web is like a living creature. It evolves as people’s ideas and thoughts change,” said Kim. “That means relentless research is necessary for developers (for better services).”

“Crawling,” or collecting data from 60 trillion websites currently in existence, is nearly impossible, so Google starts the search work with a set of known links and then crawls every link, said Kim, explaining the algorithm of the Google search system.

“Ignoring spam or broken links, prioritizing discovered links, and understanding the Web-serving infrastructure in Web search are some of the key considerations of Google,” Kim said.

When asked how to resolve the problem involving malicious torrent files hampering the Web-search process and polluting the results, he said Google would continue to work on the issue, which he saw to be one of the most difficult challenges for the company and the online community as a whole.

The Korean software developer also said ceaseless discussion and communication among coworkers helped Google build the world’s strongest search engine.

“Writing just one line of computer code needs peer review. That kind of communication with colleagues which could be thought exhaustive helps Google build a strong search system and me to grow.”

Kim, who joined Google in 2009, used to develop a computer system that decrypted handwritten archaic documents such as “the Annals of the Chosun Dynasty.”

By Kim Young-won (wone0102@heraldcorp.com)